my newly discovered de-stressing technique. (also, i’m old.)

It’s been one of those weeks where every minute is filling with something. It’s been meetings and emails and events and scheduling and writing and blogging and everything has to happen right. This. Second.

Needless to say, I’m quite ready for the weekend.

But on Wednesday, after a particularly stressful day at work, I came home and realized I finally figured out my number-one de-stresser.

You thought I was going to say wine, didn’t you?

Nope. Cleaning. (Mama/Daddy: Go ahead and pick up your jaws – I think I saw them both drop and roll across the floor. Yes, I do realize how messy I was as a child, but that was before I had a house and a puppy and a Boyfriend to clean up after. So there.)

The house was unusually dirty, because I was too lazy to clean it last week I was training/tapering in preparation for my first half-marathon last week and couldn’t make it a priority, even though we’d long since arrived at that place in the house-desperately-needs-cleaning cycle where you can’t walk around barefoot unless you want the bottoms of your feet to be completely covered in crumbs/dirt/hair/lint/whatever else happens to be on the floor, and let’s be honest – who really ever wants dirty feet bottoms?

So when I arrived home to an empty, dirty house in a not-great mood, the only thing I could think of doing was clean.

And clean I did.

Whoever invented the vacuum, bless you. I honestly don’t think there’s every been a more useful tool created.

Preston, however, would disagree with me. When I pull our vacuum out of the closet, he knows. He knows what’s about to happen. So he looks up at you with this look on his little puppy face, suspicions rising, piecing together in his little brain (or maybe it’s big? Do dogs have big brains?) that the day has come again – that dreadful day Mama gets out the big monster that’s going to eat him and he can’t believe you’re trying to implement The Evil Plan again and seriously, what kind of mother does that to her own puppy?

Or maybe he just doesn’t like the noise. Whatevs.

Anyway, he totally acts like it’s the end of his little world and runs for his life, hiding wherever he thinks you won’t find him (usually under the bed), with a frightened expression similar to this:

Maybe it’s like when I was a kid and thought if I got too close to the toilet when it was flushing that I’d get sucked down into it. But I’d like to point out that the child-butt-to-toilet-seat ratio is slightly scarier than the vacuum-mouth-to-dog ratio. As in, dear Preston, it’s just not possible for you to get sucked up by the vacuum. (Obviously, it’s totally possible for a kid to get sucked into the toilet.)

But despite Presty’s terror, I finally swept up all the dust and crumbs and other gross stuff and am happy to report that not only is the house spotless (ahem, Boyfriend. Let’s keep it that way, shall we?) but that it severely helped me unwind from the day.